The Facebook Playground

Facebook is a playground of fun connections, amazing photos, entertaining videos, and fascinating links. It offers a ton of interesting and useful information, a multitude of content sharing and networking opportunities where both personal and business relationships are formed. Several friends play on this playground which makes it that much more amusing!

For the most part the people on Facebook play nice, but we do run across those that like to add a little drama to the mix, especially in the political arena. Then there are those that like to ‘poke’ us, saturate us with game invitations, like Candy Crush Saga, and other senseless applications, and of course there are the posts that ask us to copy and paste a message on our status update and if we don’t, we feel guilty that we may not be playing nice.

Yes, it is fun to connect with family, friends and acquaintances on the Facebook playground and intermingle with them but sometimes it does get a little uncomfortable when a ‘friend’ shares ‘too much info’. Yup, we all have them, ‘friends’ who post about their latest personal escapade, share inappropriate photos and videos and keep us up to date about every activity of their life from where they are each second of the day to all the calamity they surround themselves with. These people are ‘over-sharing’ just a little ‘TMI’ and not only can they be annoying, they are opening themselves up to a mess of risks.

Once pictures and statuses are put up on Facebook, or any other social site, they have the possibility of being copied or even altered plus shared out on the Internet where they cannot be removed. The Facebook Timeline makes it easy to go back and see what someone said years ago. Over-sharing today may cause someone to regret it five years from now. Some precautions that are recommended when posting on Facebook whether for personal or business use:

• Never say something online you wouldn’t say offline
• Be selective about instant sharing from apps that track your activity
• Check your profile privacy settings on a regular basis to ensure you don’t share information you don’t mean to

What is your favorite Facebook activity? Connecting with family and old acquaintances? Meeting new friends on ‘Mafia Wars’? Building relationships with clients and prospects? However you are using Facebook, you do have to stop and consider how you are using it to represent yourself. Social media does not define who you are, but it does reflect a certain side of you that you want the world to see. So remember – what happens on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube – stays on the Internet forever!! “Happy Facebooking”!